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<h1>About MicroStrategy objects</h1>
<p>Your MicroStrategy project consists of several different types of objects, 
 including reports, documents, filters, prompts, and more. The information 
 below explains what purpose each object serves, and describes how you 
 can use the object to better analyze your organization's data.</p>
<h2>Providing business context to a report: Attributes <img src="images/attribute.gif" x-maintain-ratio="TRUE" width="15px" height="14px" border="0" class="img_whs1"> </h2>
<p>Attributes are the business concepts reflected in your stored business 
 data in your data source. Attributes provide a context in which to report 
 on and analyze business facts or calculations. While knowing your company&rsquo;s 
 total sales is useful, knowing where and when the sales took place provides 
 the kind of analytical depth users require on a daily basis.</p>
<p>For example, you have a report containing the Month, Year, and Region 
 attributes, as well as a Revenue metric. When executed, the report displays 
 your company&rsquo;s revenue for each region, during each month and year 
 for which data is available. Because of the attributes on the report, 
 a substantial amount of information is available, including which regions 
 produced the least revenue and which years saw the highest growth in revenue. 
 If you remove the attributes from the report, you can only find out how 
 much revenue the company made in total.</p>
<h2>Calculating data on a report: Metrics <img src="images/metric.gif" x-maintain-ratio="TRUE" width="15px" height="15px" border="0" class="img_whs2"></h2>
<p>Metrics are MicroStrategy objects that represent business measures and 
 key performance indicators. From a practical perspective, metrics are 
 the calculations performed on data stored in your database, the results 
 of which are displayed on a report. Metrics are similar to formulas in 
 spreadsheet software. It is not an overstatement to say that the focus 
 of almost any report is its metrics. Most of the decisions you make about 
 the other objects to include on a report depend on the metrics you use 
 on the report. Questions such as &rdquo;What were the sales for the eastern 
 region during the fourth quarter?&rdquo; or &rdquo;Are inventory counts 
 being consistently replenished at the beginning of each week?&rdquo; can 
 easily be answered by metrics.</p>
<h2>Filtering data on a report: Filters <img src="images/filter.gif" x-maintain-ratio="TRUE" width="17px" height="16px" border="0" class="img_whs3"> </h2>
<p>A filter is the part of a MicroStrategy report that screens data in 
 your data source to determine whether the data should be included in or 
 excluded from the calculations of the report results. Filters are helpful 
 in clarifying large quantities of data and only displaying subsets of 
 that data, so reports show users what they really need to see. </p>
<p>For example, you want to determine the number of injuries to your delivery 
 personnel in 2005 that may have been due to bad winter weather in the 
 northeastern U.S. You also want to know the time of day when most injuries 
 occurred. You place the Delivery Location and Delivery Time attributes 
 on your report. You also place the Number of Reported Injuries metric 
 on the report. But you only want the report to display injuries in your 
 northeast region during the winter of 2005. Without a filter, you would 
 have to sift through a lot of report data on your own. By creating a filter 
 that includes Northeast Region, January 2005, and February 2005, and using 
 that filter on the report, the data displayed when the report is executed 
 is limited to that geographical region and season. For details, see 
<a 
 HREF="WhatAreFilters.htm">Retrieving specific data from sources: Filters</a>.</p>
<h2>Asking for user input: Prompts <img src="images/prompt.gif" x-maintain-ratio="TRUE" width="17px" height="17px" border="0" class="img_whs4"> </h2>
<p>A prompt is a question the system presents to a user during report execution. 
 How the user answers the question determines what data is displayed on 
 the report when it is returned from your data source.</p>
<p>For example, an analyst in an accounting company needs a report designed 
 to show actual revenue and forecasted revenue for his company&rsquo;s 
 clients. However, the analyst does not want to see data for every corporation 
 with whom his company does business; he is only interested in seeing revenue 
 and forecasts for certain corporations and only for the current year. 
 The report designer can create one prompt that asks users to select which 
 corporations they want to see data for, and another prompt that asks users 
 what year they want to see data for. The report designer places the prompts 
 on a report. When the analyst executes the report, he is prompted to answer 
 these questions before the report&rsquo;s SQL query is sent to the data 
 source, and as a result the report displays revenue and forecast numbers 
 for only those corporations and year that this analyst is interested in 
 seeing. For details, see 
<a HREF="Creating_prompts.htm">Asking for user 
 input: Prompts</a>.</p>
<h2>Designing a report&rsquo;s structure: Templates</h2>
<p>A template is the structure that underlies any report. A template specifies 
 the set of information that the report should retrieve from your data 
 source, and it also determines the structure in which the information 
 is displayed in the report&rsquo;s results. A template&rsquo;s structure 
 is the location of objects on the template, such as showing that metrics 
 have been placed in the report&rsquo;s columns, and attributes have been 
 placed in the rows; the Revenue metric has been placed to the left of 
 the Revenue Forecast metric so that a user reading left to right can see 
 current revenue before seeing forecasted revenue; and so on. </p>
<h2>Reports <img src="images/grid2.gif" x-maintain-ratio="TRUE" width="16px" height="15px" border="0" class="img_whs5"> <img src="images/graph2.gif" x-maintain-ratio="TRUE" width="16px" height="15px" border="0" class="img_whs5"> <img src="images/gridgraph2.gif" x-maintain-ratio="TRUE" width="16px" height="18px" border="0" class="img_whs6"> &nbsp;&nbsp;</h2>
<p>A report is a MicroStrategy object that represents a request for a specific 
 set of formatted data from your data source. In its most basic form it 
 consists of two parts:</p>
<ul type="disc" class="whs7">
	
<li class=p><p>A report template (usually simply called a template), 
 which is the underlying structure of the report.</p></li>
	
<li class=p><p>The report-related objects placed on the template, such 
 as attributes, metrics, filters, and prompts.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>For details, see 
<a HREF="About_reports.htm">About reports</a>.</p>
<h2>Documents <img src="images/document.gif" x-maintain-ratio="TRUE" width="16px" height="19px" border="0" class="img_whs8"> </h2>
<p>A MicroStrategy Report Services document contains objects representing 
 data coming from one or more reports, as well as positioning and formatting 
 information. A document is used to format data from multiple reports in 
 a single display of presentation quality. Most data on a document is from 
 an underlying dataset, which is a standard MicroStrategy report. Other 
 document items that do not originate from the dataset are stored in the 
 document's definition. Examples of these other items are static text fields, 
 document page numbers, and images. For details, see 
<a HREF="Running_and_analyzing_documents.htm">Running, 
 analyzing, and saving documents</a>.</p>
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